


variation

by crossingwinter



Series: Star Wars Drabbles & Ficlets [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Sexual Content, Smut as Character Work, TFW reverse Anidala
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 07:26:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13542576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “where are we?” she asks him at last.  she’d been too delirious during their flight from wherever they’d held her.  delirious, every organ in her body rioting from whatever it was that hux’s men had injected into her, and wholly unable to understand why it was that ben was flying her away from it all.“varykino.  on naboo,” he tells her.  he doesn’t say more, but she hears the riot of thoughts in his mind, all disorganized as though he can’t decide what to tell her, or if to tell her, and in his own perplexity could hide none of it from her.my grandmother spent time here family my grandparents married here love my grandparents fell in love home in another lifetime my grandparents here





	variation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hipgrab (merrymegtargaryen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrymegtargaryen/gifts).



“i hate waiting,” rey whispers, and even though he is not in the room with her, she knows he hears her.  he has heard her every day for the past three weeks.  it was what kept her sane in that dark room, through the pain, through the fear.   _i will find you.  i will help you.  please, stay alive for me._

_please_

she hears his footsteps from the next room and he comes in, taller than the building was designed for.  wherever they are, rey thinks it was designed for neither of them.  he is too tall, too broad, too angular for such delicate curving architecture; she is too…well, it is the home of someone who had never known the poverty that shaped her.  

“there is no news,” he tells her quietly as he crosses the room.  he wears loose-fitting brown pants and a white shirt.  how different he looks when not in black–younger, less severe, less frightening, less frightened.  

“when will we have news?” she asks, aware of how much she sounds like a petulant child.   _when will they be back? quiet child._ when _.  don’t ask pointless questions._

ben just shakes his head.  “general dameron doesn’t trust me enough to give me clearance.”

she raises her eyebrows at him.  “and you’re accepting that?”

“if the whole point of this exercise is to see whether they can trust me, i should probably adhere to the boundaries they set.  i’ve gotten what i wanted out of this so far.”  his tone is clipped, and he does not say it aloud, but she hears anyway,  _unless you want to lose me to a traitor’s execution._

her throat goes dry and she throws the blankets off her–

“you’re still recovering, don’t–”

–and gets up, wincing but not caring.  she crosses the room and wraps her arms around him.   _never,_ she thinks to him fiercely.   _you were so hard won.  i never want to lose you._ _i will help you.  please, stay alive for me._

he wraps an arm around her mid-mid back, pulling her tightly to his chest, his other hand coming up to support her head at the top of her neck.  she expects him to kiss her, but he doesn’t.  he rests his chin on the top of her skull and breathes deeply, holding her against his heart.

“you should get back in bed,” he tells her softly, but he doesn’t let her move.  her body is weary, but rey hates waiting and lying there uselessly is too akin to waiting.  

“where are we?” she asks him at last.  she’d been too delirious during their flight from wherever they’d held her.  delirious, every organ in her body rioting from whatever it was that hux’s men had injected into her, and wholly unable to understand why it was that  _ben_  was flying her awayfrom it all.  

“varykino.  on naboo,” he tells her.  he doesn’t say more, but she hears the riot of thoughts in his mind, all disorganized as though he can’t decide what to tell her, or if to tell her, and in his own perplexity could hide none of it from her.  

_my grandmother spent time here _family_ my grandparents married here  _love_  my grandparents fell in love home in another lifetime my grandparents here_

she wishes she could see his face, but they are standing so close that she won’t be able to.  so she contents herself with tilting her head up and pressing a kiss to the bump in his throat.  almost imperceptibly, his arm tightens around her.

rey hates waiting.  she also hates being treated like some fragile child who hasn’t climbed through star destroyers with three broken ribs before.  “show me?” she asks his neck, and he rubs his nose through her hair.  

 _i shouldn’t_  he thinks.

“all right,” he says.

* * *

the sunlight is gentle as they walk slowly around the lake and up into the hills.  everything is green and blue, water and earth, and the sun–rey has never known a sun so gentle before.  suns burn, suns parch, suns murder–they don’t caress her with a light heat, soften her skin with sweat, warm her against the wind that rolls through the grass.  

she walks slowly, and she aches, and she should be able to heal herself–she knows you can with the force–but she doesn’t know how.  no one ever taught her.   _i’ll have to teach myself._ she had taught herself to read, to fly, to fight–healing can just be one more thing.  

ben’s hand never leaves the small of her back.  she catches flits of thought on his mind whenever he feels her wincing  _should go back_  and  _should rest_ and  _shouldn’t enable her_  and  _whatever she wants_  dance around in his mind–a brighter surface to the darker thoughts that he is doing her best to keep from her. 

he notices before she does that she is tired, and guides her to the ground on a point beneath a line of waterfalls.  they lie down flat on the ground and stare up at the white puffy clouds in the sky. “it feels less like waiting when we’re doing something.”  she needs him to know, to make him feel less guilty for allowing her from her sickbed.

 _you’ve always been impatient,_ he understands, but says “it’s easy to forget the galaxy in a place like this.”  _i have been too._

rey hums in agreement.  “it’s hard to believe a place like jakku exists when there’s this,” she says.

“jakku shouldn’t exist,” he deadpans, “junkyard of a planet.”   _with a diamond in the rough._ he rubs his thumb over her arm.  his lips find her temple.  they worship there.

she closes her eyes, and loves the softness of warmth, the way the heat is not overpowering, the way water flows around them, life-giving and abundant.  everything she had had to force herself to thrive in is easier here, with ben’s lips against her skin.

“have you been here before?” she asks him, and his lips turn into his nose, nudging against her.

“no.  the connection to padme naberrie was…always fraught,” he replies.   _vader,_ his thoughts tell her,  _my mother’s shame and anger mistrust and legacy she was so beloved and he so hated and he killed her he loved her he killed her he loved her_ “but…but i feel as though i have been.”

“oh?”

“like i’ve dreamed of being here, that all this is familiar to me.”

_like an island in an endless ocean?_

_no, not like that.  that was your future.  this feels like my past._

“familiar in a good way?”

he pauses considering.  

_my grandparents fell in love_

“yes.”

and rey turns to look at him.  his eyes are so deep and brown, and his hair is flopping into them.  his skin has a light sheen of sweat on it from their walk and from the gentle warmth of the air around them.  he glows not with flame but with sunlight.

_please_

his hand in hers.  

she reaches over and brushes some of his dark hair from his eyes and her lips inch across his cheek to find his and when at last she kisses him everything is still.

she had not realized how long she’d waited to kiss him until their lips meet, and how rey has always hated waiting.  how rarely has waiting given her anything, but waiting for ben, the taste of his breath in her mouth, the way she feels his quivering heart under her hand–it was worth the wait to kiss him in gentle sunlight, rather than the cold bleakness of space.  ben’s lips are that much sweeter because she had waited for them, had not leapt for them too soon.  ben’s lips are the most valuable thing she’s ever scavenged.   _you were so hard won._ and all the sweeter in victory, because she had struggled and failed and yet here she lay, her face pressed to his, her heart pressed to his.  

_that was your future this feels like my past_

_i want it to be our future_

his breath hitches and his pulls his lips from hers, resting his forehead against hers for a moment.

_did you mean that?_

she makes to kiss him again as an answer but he pulls his lips away again.  

_did you?_

_i did._

and they are back, those scavenged lips, and her hands make their way across his face, memorizing every line, the curve of the scar she had cut there, the angle of his cheekbones, the line of his hair.  she twines her arms around his neck and pulls him closer to her because the warm sun is not so warm as the heat of his heart pulsing life through his body and she is a child of the desert.  there is water and greenery all around her, but she is parched for him, she finds.

spinning eternities he kisses into her, past and present and future all on the tip of his tongue, the force they balance, life and death and never ending, shared in the very nerves of their body.  there is a desert dry past in his lips and the greenest future she has ever known in hers and it is not the first time it will never be the last.  

 _i think i came to exist to love you,_ but that is not ben’s voice in her mind.  it can’t perturb her though because it echoes in his heart.  it is too loving to worry at whose voice it was, and rey is lost in finding herself in ben’s lips.

they part for her tongue, opening like the chest that had contained his grandfather’s lightsaber, the one she had cut him with, the one they had broken together.  she’d seen visions when she’d touched the saber for the first time, seen variations of the future when she’d first touched his hand–but when her tongue touches his there is a blissful blankness that spreads across her mind, and the voices and eternities all coalesce into one being–her being, her heart and body and mind, none of them broken, all of them thriving with shared breath.

he groans, and it vibrates through her and where she’d been half on her side now he rolls her onto her back, his hands cupping her face, so blissfully warm against her skin.  

 _all this is familiar to me_  as her hands dance across his back, finding the hem of that white shirt and sliding beneath it to feel the skin that kept his heart–her heart for his heart was her heart–so wonderfully alive.  

 _please, stay alive for me_ as heat unlike the sun, unlike the desert–a wet heat, simmering heat–gathers between her legs.  her body is sore and tired but she pushes him onto his back anyway and straddles his hips for no other reason than that she wants to.  

 _you’ve always been impatient_ as he groans into her lips again and rises to meet her, his hands pulling at the ties in her hair, the bulge at his hips stiffening more and more with each passing second.  she tugs that white shirt up over his head and does not fear the sun will burn him when she throws it to the grass and buries her face into the skin of his shoulder, letting her parched lips take in the sweat that has gathered there as her hips roll like ocean waves against his.  her hands luxuriate in the softness of his skin, in the puckering of scar tissue when she finds one more wound he’s lived through, one more failed attempt to destroy him.  here he is under her hands, under her hips, whole and hers.  

_whole and mine and i will never let you go_

was that her thought or his?  he wonders the same thing when she pulls her head away and looks into his eyes.  

 _is this_ am i  _what you want?_

_you’re always so serious always carrying the weight of the universe on your shoulders_

rey tugs her own shirt up over her head and it joins ben’s somewhere on the green and he buries his face between her breasts, back bowed, hands at her waist.  he presses a kiss to her sternum and looks up at her with a boy’s eye’s though he is much older than she.  

_is this too much for you?  after everything you’ve been through?_

he is too frightened to ask the question aloud, to hear her say no, but he needs to ask it, the lingering knowledge of what they had done to her burning in the back of his mind.

“you make me forget it all,” she tells him, and it is her turn to kiss the top of his head, to curve herself over him.  “you make me remember…”

she remembers what it is to feel safe in someone’s arms as he kisses his way across her chest.  she remembers what it is to feel as though she is the center of someone’s universe as he rocks his hips into hers.  she remembers heartbreakingly blissful love as her hair blows in the wind and his fingers trace circles on her ribs.  

she remembers things that aren’t her memories but they are a truth deeper than the core of the planet they thrive upon.

she remembers life, and death and everything in between, but mostly she remembers ben–ben as he’d taken off his helmet–ben as he’d wept before her–ben as the door to her cell had opened and she’d known crushing relief at the sight of him.

her arms tighten around him when his hand slips down the front of her trousers, probing tentatively at the wet flesh beneath.  she whimpers into his lips as he feels through her feelings where she needs him the most and he moves his hand to meet her needs.  his nervous anticipation pounds in her chest when he slides a finger into her, and thumbs across the nub that crowns her slit, feels his relief when she moans and goes still and her eyes flutter closed against the bright day, burning red through her skin rather than darkness.

he moves decisively after that, and rey finds herself on her back again, the grass tickling her skin as he shucks her pants down her legs, his fingers fluttering over her thighs as he makes his way back up her legs and circles the folds of her sex before slipping two fingers into her again.  he lies at her side, his head bent over her breast and rey smiles at the red sun through her closed eyes as her breath hitches and her heart beats the same tattoo it had when he’d looked at her after snoke and before the guards.  her hand drifts to his hair and combs through it as she gasps at the touch of his fingers and widens her hips because that lets him press deeper.  

how deep will he go?  does it matter, when he already has her heart?  

_you went straight to the dark you didn’t try to stop it_

“ben,” she sighs and her voice is mixed with wind and water and his lips leave her nipple to suck a blossoming bruise onto the underside of her breast.  his fingers curl and she whimpers again, “ben,” as she wriggles herself into the grass and dirt, pushing herself onto his hand even more.

she wants to be consumed by him, wants to feel nothing but him forever and ever and she knows he knows that as he slides a third finger into her, filling her completely–making her wish it weren’t his hand inside her.  

“ben,” she pants again and he kisses his way down her stomach now, sucking a row of roses into her skin.  she feels bereft of him at her side as he slides down and settles himself between her legs.  the fingers of the hand not inside of her run through the soft dark curls of her mound and she realizes that her own fingers match the motion in the grass beneath her.  

“you’re home,” he whispers to her before lowering his lips to draw her clit between them.  when his tongue swirls around it, rey loses herself in a wave not unlike the feeling of first flight, and when he rolls the nub between his lips the beating of her heart loses itself in the sound of waterfalls as she clenches around his fingers and falls into eternity.

he pulls his fingers from her and she tastes herself through his tongue as he licks them clean.  she feels her fluttering walls as he licks along the length of her slit and it’s only because she wants to taste it truly that she fumbles down, fingers scrambling across his shoulders to ease him back up the length of her body and draw his sweet lips–tangier now from her–back to hers.

she sighs into his mouth and clutches him to her.

“never let me go,” she tells him.

“never,” he kisses into her neck.

she can feel every inch of him–the muscles of his torso against her stomach, under the hands that rove his back.  she can feel him hard against her hip through his pants and smiles into his lips as she brings her hands down between them to press against it.  she relishes the choked moan it elicits and when she pulls her lips at last from his and whispers, “off with these,” she watches with sated joy as he sits back and unbuttons his trousers and shoves them unceremoniously down his legs.  

_are you an angel_

he is so beautiful, kneeling there between her legs, his cheeks flushed, his skin sweaty, his lips shining from hers.  his eyes are so bright, and the love she sees there rolls her stomach.  he is so beautiful, and she sits up and pushes him down on the grass again, straddling his hips once again and it is her turn to take his breath away. 

she presses her lips to his forehead as she runs her hand along his shaft, her grip loose because he is not a lightsaber, not a staff to fight with.  his hands are on her hips, and his grip is not so gentle as he rocks her into him and she rests her forehead to his when she looks down between them, watches carefully as he lifts her up and she settles down over the length of him, sighing together as they complement one another perfectly.  

then she begins to thrust, and his hands hold her in place as she does, his lips at her throat.  the tips of her breasts rub against his chest as she sets a steady pace at first, thrumming warmth from his heart to hers.  together, they are the sun shining on naboo, their breath the peaceful wind, the slickness of her sex the waterfalls around them.  together, they are all the world–and none of it.

her pace grows quicker, his hands more insistent, pulling her more quickly to him and her head falls back with the way she stretches around him and the way he fills and empties her and fills her back again–that it is him inside her and that he’ll never let her go, that he is hard won and here at the end of it all, moaning her name into her neck as she rides him until there are tears in his eyes, and his breath is coming in shallow gasps and she feels more wet warmth–his mixing with hers–pooling inside her.

his cheeks are flushed as he lies down flat in the grass, pulling her down to lie on his chest.  slowly she feels him going limp inside her but neither of them move.  she rests her head over his heart and listens there to its steady beating–listening as though she has never heard his heart before.

_you’re breaking my heart_

but no

no that memory is wrong.  it is not hers and it is wrong.

_you’re re-making my heart_

yes, that is better.

his arms tighten around her at the correction, but he doesn’t say a word and for once his mind is calm.  no agitation, no fear–nothing at all.  just the steady pumping of his blood through his living heart, coursing through him like a waterfall.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me [here](http://galacticprideandprejudice.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


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